AlphaGo

This is the human side of the AI story. Layered upon all of the hollywood-style AI movies, where the humans always prevail through phenomenal luck, this tells it like it is. This is a wake-up call for the billion people who felt homosapien-superiority. Lee Sedol fits perfectly the role of the champion night humbled by a child prodigy, Demis Hassabis, the CEO, is the humble wizard, who knows the outcome, and is visibly pleased that the human got a face-saving win. The bigger story revolves around the national pride and fear, which brought at least 60 million viewers in Asia, and sparked a panic in China's government. Some subtle, salient details of AlphaGo's nature were revealed in the coders' actions and reactions. In particular, that the 30M training sets had probably missed large areas of strategy that humans work out through true intelligence. At one point, one engineer notes that AlphaGo is NOT a true AI. That is, it (probably) does not have any form of consciousness or reasoning, and is simply a pattern learning Neural Net, with some clever tree search. But, that should not fool anyone into complacency. The path from Alpha to Omega .. are laid before us.

This is such a beautiful telling of this historic moment. They included so well the struggle that Fan Hui and Lee Sedol felt as they played, and highlighted the dilemma that many researchers are feeling right now our the power of AI algorithms increases. A scientist friend of mine said, "It made me feel things."

Truly incredible film. As a computer scientist, this film is so inspiring. The future seems so bright! It's worth noting that AlphaGo 's story did not end with the Lee Seedol match. They improved it and, using a mysterious online persona called 'Master', began playing matches online against top pros. There was a second five-game series against the number 1 player Ke Jie, and, perhaps most amazingly, they ended up retraining the entire program from scratch but without any human data whatsoever. Starting from totally random play, it managed to surpass the version seen in the film in 72 hours. They called it AlphaGo Zero, and you can view the games and the DeepMind people (the ones in the movie) talking about it on the Youtube channel. Can't recommend this film enough, truly inspirational.